Potatoes
Amongst the routine of the garden are moments of intensity. These moments are like: boom, a flood of excitement happens and it’s like a peak. Harvesting some of our potatoes this week is one of these peaks for both of us.
This year we planted our potatoes in one of our best draining tunnels that consistently grows us really healthy plants, so the potatoes were off to a good start. Dylan also decided to experiment with a different growing method than last year. This year instead of adding compost as mulch on top of the potatoes, we added a really thick layer of straw mulch instead. We didn’t plant them too deep and we didn’t do any hilling.
The potatoes were planted in September and they’ve been looking healthy ever since they popped up, so we were anticipating they’d do pretty good. Obviously both of us are kind of gentle pessimists in the garden so our expectations are pretty tempered with experience.
So neither of us expected that they’d do as well as they did, we are both really excited because it feels like some of the experiments in the garden are paying off.
As were harvesting the potatoes our enthusiasm grew, and now potatoes have become an intense line of enquiry for thinking about hybridisation, plant genetics, soil health and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and colonisation.
Potatoes are one of those crops that small scale growers just are not really encouraged to grow because their margins are supposedly so small, and we can appreciate where that wisdom comes from. But this years crop has really challenged that thinking for us, which is exciting in itself.
As our potato thinking and research accumulates and becomes legible we’ll be writing about it here in the Produce Library. At this time I cant quite get my head around Polyploid plants yet or even begin to write sensitively around plant domestication in the Chile, let alone the genocide that accompanied Potatoes introduction into European culture.
And it would be a mistake for me to insinuate that some these topics are even general accepted knowledge, because some of them are still very much under investigation. Our histories with edible plants are complicated and messy, and the more I come to understand them the more I find them to be so.
In the mean time we’ll be roasting, boiling and frying potatoes and appreciating their complexities. Expect more writing here in the coming months as our understandings deepen and become a bit more solid.
